Sweeney swirled his Scotch around in his mouth, like he didn’t know whether to swallow or spit it out. He grimaced as he gulped it down. “A bug. Inside you?” was all he said.
Hoon tapped his finger against his own, still half-full, glass. “That’s right. Just like you said. Got on my skin, next thing I know, I can… I don’t know. Feel it, first, I suppose,” he said, almost absent-mindedly. “Then it’s like I can hear it. Like it’s talking to me.”
Sweeney frowned. “Talking? What’s it saying?”
“Nothing fucking constructive, I’ll tell you that much,” Hoon said. He leaned forwards and lowered his voice. “It’s telling me to hurt people,” he said, fixing Sweeney with an unblinking stare. “Kill them. It’s always there, trying to push me over the edge, you know? Nagging away. Bit like my ex-wife, in fact, but marginally less spiteful.”
“Right,” said Sweeney, his lips moving silently as he tried to process this information. “But you can ignore it?”
“Oh aye, I can totally fucking ignore it. Wee prick’s not going to boss me around,” said Hoon. He chewed his lip. “But, well, here’s the thing. I think it’s, like… connected.”
“Connected?”
“Aye.”
“Connected to what?”
“To all of them,” Hoon said. “Or some of them. Or… I don’t know. But there’s, like, glimpses. Just flashes, like that thing they can do with films, where they put one frame in, you know?”
“Subliminal messaging,” Sweeney said.
“Aye, well, it’s like that, but I don’t really see them, just, sort of, feel them. Does that make sense?”
“Not a bit,” Sweeney said.
Hoon snorted. “Aye. I sound like a right fucking headcase, I bet.”
“Could be some sort of hive mind, maybe,” Sweeney said. “Have you tried focusing on them?” he asked. “These flashes?”
Hoon shook his head. “And why the fuck would I want to do that?”
“Well, if they are connected, like you say, it might tell us something. You might be able to find out… I don’t know what. Anything would be a help at this point, because as you’ve probably noticed, we’re floundering around in the dark here,” Sweeney said. “The world is falling around us, and we don’t know how or why. If you can find something out… Well, it’s a start, isn’t it?”
“Suppose,” Hoon admitted. “But what do I do?”
“Stop ignoring it,” Sweeney said. “Listen to what it’s telling you.”
“I’ll be honest, that sounds pretty fucking dangerous to me,” Hoon said.
“I’m not saying act on it – please, don’t act on it! But listen. It’s in your head, so get in there and make that creepy little bastard work to our advantage. Be the bad cop. Make it squeal.”
Hoon nodded slowly. He gestured to the gun holstered on Sweeney’s hip. “Keep that ready, just in case,” he said.
“I won’t need that. If you kick off, I’ll put you down without shooting you. You have my word on that,” Sweeney said.
Hoon looked him up and down. “What, a lanky streak o’ pish like you? Aye, good fucking luck, pal. Keep the gun ready.”
He sat back in the chair and rested his hands on the arms, fingers wrapped around where the leather met the wooden front panel. The moment he closed his eyes, he could feel the bug stirring. It could sense that something was different. Something had changed.
“There you are, ya wee arsehole,” Hoon muttered, his brow knotting. A whisper echoed in his head – more a sensation than an actual sound. He flexed his fingers, fighting the urge to stick them in his ears and go, “la-la-la,” until the whispering stopped. “Aye, keep it up, ye prick,” he said, gritting his teeth. “Let’s see what you’ve got, eh?”
Light flickered behind his eyes. An image. Flash-flash. The bug squirmed and slithered. Hoon screwed his face up, his knuckles now white as he gripped the chair.
The image flickered again. No, not one image, several of them. They whizzed past, like the pages of a picture book being flipped at high speed. He caught just glimpses of them. Sensations, really.
People running. People screaming. People dying.
The bug’s whispering became background static, and Hoon felt his lungs go tight as he realized the bug was no longer talking to him. It
was
him. Or he was it. One of the two, anyway.
Hoon was no longer aware of the chair now, or of the room, or of the hotel. He was in the darkness behind his own eyes, watching the flash and flicker of thousands of horror-show images playing out in blisteringly high-resolution.
Flash
. A woman, her clothes torn, pinned beneath three howling men.
Flash
. A child, screaming in an upside-down car, his parents dead in the front seats.
Flash.
A hospital ward. Maternity. Blood on the walls.
On and on it went.
Flash. Flash. Flash.
And then…
And then…
Two boys. Young men, actually. One he recognized. One he didn’t. One infected. One not. Fighting. Lashing out at each other on what looked to be a train. Fighting for survival. Fighting to the death.
The sound of machine-gun fire jolted Hoon awake. The images rushed away into blackness. The whispering rose to a frenzied fever pitch, then spluttered and died.
Hoon stood up, his legs shuddering beneath him. “Jaden!” he shouted, his voice hoarse with anguish. “He’s… my son’s alive,” he gasped. “Jaden’s alive!”
More machine-gun fire erupted outside. Hoon sprang to the window and saw a line of soldiers backing across the grass, taking shots at something beyond the trees.
A woman in a pair of mud-slicked pyjamas scrambled out of the woods and up the embankment beside it. Gunfire roared. A spray of red filled the air at the back of the woman’s head, then she went down.
Hoon placed a hand on the glass, steadying himself. The soldiers outside were joined by a few others, and they all stood their ground as a small crowd of hunched-over people came bounding out of the trees.
When he pulled his hand away from the window, the first thing Hoon noticed was the blood. A perfect handprint, marking the glass in crimson.
He looked down as he brought both hands up. The blood was slicked past his wrists, soaking the ends of his sleeves. He could feel it trickling around his elbows. Warm. Fresh.
Outside, the soldiers continued to fire. Inside, Hoon slowly turned around.
Sweeney was still sitting in his chair, but the chair was now toppled all the way backwards. Hoon approached, his hands still held in front of him, his throat and lungs all tangled together in one breathless knot.
The lieutenant’s throat was gone. That was the only way to describe it. From the top of his chest to the bottom of his chin was a raw strip of nothing but bloody, quivering flesh. His eyes were open, staring helplessly at one of the chandeliers hanging overhead. Beside him, just out of his reach, lay his gun.
The door to the bar
squeaked
as it was thrown open. A woman in uniform hurried in. “Sir,” she began, then she stopped when she saw the grisly scene spread out before her.
Hoon looked over at her. He looked down at Sweeney. He looked at his bloody hands.
“Oh.” He sighed. “
Fucking
Hell.”
May 25th, 12:23 PM
Moira Hoon didn’t know much about castles, and she didn’t really care to, either. What she did know, however, was that Inverlochy Castle was home to a very expensive restaurant, and wherever there was a very expensive restaurant, there was usually a well-stocked wine cellar.
“Bingo,” she said, using the barrel of her shotgun to nudge open a door at the back of the castle’s large kitchen. A set of wooden steps led down into darkness, but she could just make out the glint of light reflecting off dozens of dusty glass bottles.
She felt along the rough stone wall just inside the door until her hand found the plastic casing of the light switch. She flicked the switch, but the basement remained defiantly dark. She clicked the switch again a few times, just in case, then shrugged and stepped into the gloom.
The stairs groaned under her weight as she made her way to the bottom. Once down, she cast her eye across the first few bottle racks. She’d be the first to admit she didn’t know a whole lot about wine. Her knowledge of the subject extended as far as
white good, red better
, and she couldn’t even recall if she’d ever tried a rosé, which suggested she probably hadn’t.
Still, she wasn’t about to let a little thing like ignorance stop her. She’d been confronted with all manner of confounding situations over the years, and had got through them all through bluster and pig-headedness alone. A little thing like choosing a good wine was hardly going to pose a big challenge.
Of course, an argument could be made that she shouldn’t be choosing a wine in the first place. The world was ending, after all. But then, if the end of the world wasn’t an excuse to drink heavily in the middle of the day, she was damned if she knew what was.
Moira leaned her shotgun against the wall, then paced along the racks, stopping occasionally to pick up a bottle, read the label, then put it back where she found it. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, exactly, but felt the perfect bottle would somehow make itself known.
She had just turned the corner at the end of the second rack – a solid-looking oak construction, with narrow shelves filled with moody-looking riojas – when she tripped over something heavy on the floor.
Stumbling forwards, she made a grab for the next rack. Her hands found the wooden frame. Her arms locked, and the rack jerked, rattling the bottles. For a moment, she thought the rack was going to topple, but it held, and she was able to keep hold of the frame until she’d found her footing again.
She peered down into the shadows by the floor. There was a large shape there, half-hidden in the dark. Her knees
cricked
as she squatted down to investigate.
It was the hand she saw first, limp and lifeless on the scuffed tiles, the fingers curved upwards like the legs of a dead fly. She cast her gaze slowly across the body, her eyes becoming more accustomed to the dark. It was a girl. Not a woman, Moira realized – she was two or three years away from that – but a girl, dressed in a smart, black and white outfit. A waitress.
A very young, very dead one.
At first, she thought the girl’s eyes were wide open. She reached over to close them, then recoiled. The eyes weren’t open. They were gone. All that remained were two black holes either side of her nose, and a wash of blood from her cheeks to her forehead.
Moira didn’t scream. She didn’t panic, or run, or thrash around in fright. She just sighed and looked down at the floor by her feet, then whispered a prayer that the girl was somewhere better now.
She was standing up when she saw the second body, and still processing that when she spotted the third and fourth. They lay lined up on the floor, side-by-side, but a few meters apart. They were all hotel staff. The girl was the youngest, but none of them looked older than late-twenties. Mind you, with their eyes missing it wasn’t easy to tell for sure.
“Well,” Moira whispered. “What the buggering fuck?”
A movement from one of the bodies laser-focused her attention. It was a man, second along from the young waitress, dressed in chef’s whites that were now anything but. His chest heaved upwards, arching his back a few centimeters off the floor, before he flopped back down again.
“Oh my goodness, are you OK? Can you hear me?” Moira called, stepping over the other bodies as she hurried to the man’s side. She dropped heavily onto her knees – she’d regret that next morning, she knew – and quickly felt for the man’s pulse. His body was motionless again, his hollow eye sockets gazing emptily upwards.
“Can you hear me?” Moira asked, pressing her fingers harder against his neck, searching for any sign of life. “Come on, I just saw you move, don’t play silly buggers on me now!”
She’d just begun to lean down to listen to his chest when the blade emerged. It sliced straight upwards through the center of his chest, spattering Moira in bloody chunks. Moira toppled backwards as the blade arced left and right like the windshield wipers of a car. The first swipe sliced the man down to the crotch. The other split him straight through the middle of his face, the blade stopping when it hit the floor beneath his head.
Crawling backwards over the other bodies, Moira frantically tried to remember where she’d put the shotgun. The two halves of the man’s dismembered corpse were sliding apart now, pushed outwards by something within.
More blades emerged, wriggling free of the carcass. They were legs, Moira realized. Long, spindly bug-like legs, each one almost half a meter long.
The bodies weren’t bodies at all. Or, rather, they were. But they were something else, too.
Incubators.
Another bug leg squirmed free. Moira let out a yelp of shock as the young waitress began to buck and thrash on the floor beside her.
“Oh, bollocks to this,” she gasped. She scrambled to her feet, spotted the shotgun, and grabbed it as she hurried for the stairs. She took the steps as fast as her old hips would let her, then staggered out into the kitchen and slammed the door.
There was a keyhole in the door, but no key. A chest freezer was plugged into the wall nearby. Yanking the plug free of its socket, she heaved the appliance in front of the door, paused for a moment to get her breath back, then headed off in search of her brother.